At the corner of Lafayette and Union streets is the Cavour Club, where a short while ago firefighters found a small fire, a broken bottle and traces of some flammable liquid — a Molotov cocktail, said Battalion Chief Mike Lilienthal.
The Molotov cocktail, by the way, is not Russian, but Finnish. It was not invented by the Finns — humans have been stuffing flammables into breakables for thousands of years — but it was named by them.
As the story goes, when the Soviet Union invaded Finland in 1939, the Soviet diplomat Vyacheslav Molotov claimed that Soviet planes were not dropping bombs, but food for starving Finns. The bombs, RRAB-3s, were then derisively nicknamed “Molotov bread baskets” by the Finns. The cocktail, used against Soviet tanks, was a drink to accompany the meal.
The Molotov thrown at the Cavour Club didn’t do much damage. The door was blistered, and a sign had wilted. An arson investigator would be dropping by later to examine the evidence, Lilienthal said.
